"Abolish ICE"

Eight years ago, I wrote an article for Slate arguing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was an out-of-control agency that had become a “sinister” and “draconian” force “harassing and detaining people who pose no threat to the United States or its citizens.” 

The American people, I contended, needed “an honest discussion about whether ICE can be effectively reformed or if it must be abolished and replaced by an agency that can carry out its mission in a more effective and humane way.”

Now, however, we are past the point of conversation. In the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, ICE is virtual secret police. Masked and heavily armed, ICE agents are sent to cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis to terrorize immigrant communities and brutalize people who challenge their efforts to stop and detain anyone deemed suspicious. 

To expand its reach, ICE greatly lowered its recruitment standards, effectively enlisting anyone who cares to sign up. To attract new officers, ICE advertises the chance to do violence to people deemed “enemies” of the United States, likening civil immigration enforcement to a war on a dangerous, alien force.

The result is an agency whose agents’ first recourse appears to be violence or the threat of violence. According to The Trace, a newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence, immigration agents have opened fire in 16 separate incidents since last June: “At least three people have been shot observing or documenting immigration raids, and five people have been shot while driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action.”

This week, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old resident of Minneapolis. She was sitting in her S.U.V. when agents ran up and demanded she exit the vehicle, pulling on the door in an effort to compel compliance. Soon after, three shots rang out. An analysis of video footage by The Times strongly suggests that Good had been moving away from the agent in question when he fired, killing her and causing the vehicle to crash nearby.

Since then, the Trump administration has been engaged in a relentless effort to tar Good as a dangerous militant who was using her S.U.V. to attack ICE agents, an act of “domestic terrorism,” according to the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem. “This was an attack on law and order, this was an attack on the American people,” said Vice President JD Vance. Good can be seen in a different video telling her eventual killer, “I’m not mad at you dude.”

Immigration enforcement seems to have ramped up its efforts even further in the wake of Good’s death. On Thursday, during an operation in Portland, Ore., Border Patrol agents shot and wounded two people. The administration, as it did with Good, immediately accused the victims of being dangerous threats to the nation.

It is true that the country needs some form of immigration enforcement. But it doesn’t need ICE. It doesn’t need an agency whose institutional identity is wedded to wanton cruelty and the apparent hair-trigger use of lethal force. It doesn’t need an agency that has been transformed into a paramilitary enforcer of despotic rule. It doesn’t need roving bands of masked thugs shooting and killing ordinary people under the cover of law.

During the first Trump administration, left-wing activists demanded that the nation abolish ICE. They were right then, and they are right now.

-Jamelle Bouie, NY Times